Hitfix is reporting the rumor that The Hangover star Bradley Cooper (Wedding Crashers, “Alias”) is a frontrunner to play the title role in director Martin Campbell’s Green Lantern. No deal has been signed yet, however.

The site says the Warner Bros. Pictures comic book adaptation starts shooting later this summer for a December 17, 2010 release.

The “Green Lantern” was created in 1940 by writer Bill Finger and artist Martin Nodell. Hal Jordan, introduced in 1959, is a second-generation test pilot, an ordinary man who was given the power ring and battery (lantern) by a dying alien named Abin Sur. When Abin Sur’s spaceship crashed on Earth, the alien used his ring to seek out an individual to take his place as Green Lantern: someone who was “utterly honest and born without fear.”